Personal intelligent assistant services (e.g. Alexa®, Siri®, Cortana®, Google Home®) have some preprogrammed hot words which can be recognized to activate a specific service. For example, “Alexa®, what's the weather,” may be a trigger for active listening to a user query. However, this technology is limited to examples where a service (e.g. intelligent personal assistant service) is being directly addressed. On any given day, the most common noun heard by a person is usually their name. Apart from their name being called by another person right in front of the person, often the name is called at public address (PA) announcement systems at airport, at restaurants, university lecture rooms, etc., where a person may not be paying immediate attention to the announcement. People who are deaf or hard of hearing see this as huge roadblock in their lives because they either cannot hear or are unable to interpret sounds around them, they are constantly looking for cues to help them recognize their name being called out.
Furthermore, known services for audio recognition (e.g. intelligent personal assistant services) may struggle with name identification. Users of such services understand the limitations where typical intelligent personal assistant services may struggle with identifying user speech for any number of reasons including not being able to interpret user speech, not recognizing a name. For instance, typical intelligent personal assistant services may struggle with non-Western names like “Anirudh” or “Machanavajhala”, where most speech recognition systems would never recognize such names.
As such, examples of the present application are directed to the general technical environment related to proactive speech detection on behalf of a user and alerting the user when a specific word, name, etc. is detected.